To that end I intend to flop some of the stuff from the first draft on to my blog so you can peruse it.
Take out your red pen, circle the errors. Circle the wagons.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
This is from LOT
CHAPTER 1- TALLBOY
“The truth shall set you free”
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose”
Truth is the knife we slit our wrists with as we watch ourselves die one breath at a time.
Give me the quilted, downy softness of a comfortable lie anytime.
I can wrap myself in it and keep out the cold hard truth from blowing down my back. A lie is like eyeshadow on a transvestite. No matter how much there is, or how many plucked eyebrow hairs, or hormone injections, or real tits or fake tits, it all doesn’t matter because he can still feel his balls knocking against his thighs and that, my friend, is the truth.
Deep down on the scars at the bottom of your heart, and mine, we all know the truth. The smoke they keep blowing up our asses sure keeps us warm and cozy though, doesn’t it.
The truth is ugly.
The lie is beautiful, it has to be, hand crafted by silk tongues or your money back, guaranteed. As old tom once said, the large print giveth and the small print taketh away.
Cold ugly truth number one: I am ugly.
I’ve known it all my life, though a full head of hair and a few less scars helped to hide it just a little. I’ve always known, down in the scars at the bottom of my heart. Not quite pork chop around my neck so the dog will play with me, but flawed somehow.
For me the mirror shines like a knife blade.
Is truth consensus? If I can get enough people to tell me I’m handsome will it change the ugly truth? Is truth a function of it’s benefactor? When a known, good for nothing lying bastard fesses up the truth, dredged from the deepest mire of a cement cold heart, is it less truth the off hand comment of a saint?
I have sought the lie with every fraction of my six foot five inch frame. I have watched myself in that knife blade mirror getting older and slower. They say the universe is expanding, not quite as fast as the belly beneath my shirt. But my personal horizon and opportunity is declining, faster than a junkies master card.
I sit near the door, the throb of the bass like a pain as it rattles the infection in my molar. The pain of it twists my face into an approximation of my station. I scowl at the pimply faced kid trying to pass off his older brothers I.D. as his own.
Sometimes I think the sign that flashes out front attracts them, flies to
what they think is honey but is really horse shit, though I suppose they’d be drawn to it all the same.
‘Adult entertainment’ that must be considered a function of the fact that most children would find it drop dead boring, and from the sounds of the patrons they might agree. There is more excitement in seven hundred and twenty by four hundred and eighty six pixels flashing past at thirty frames a second than could be gleaned in the dim black neon and smoke filled couches. They are still learning the truth, they don’t need to hear the lie.
Well, not just yet.
“Beat it kid. That goes for your posse too. Make sure Hank gets his I.D. back before he heads off to school.”
“Bullshit, man. I’m Hank. This is my I.D. now let me in.”
I shift my weight. My ass has fallen asleep on this black stool with a split across the cheap vinyl seat.
“Okay, what’s you phone number Hank. Bet if I call home right now Hank’ll be there. Whatcha say, pizza face? Double or nothing. If I call the Wheelhouser residence and ol’ Hank ain’t home you all get in and I wave the cover. If Hank’s home, you leave the cover and fuck off.”
I could see the calculations going on in his mind. Is Hank home or over banging his girlfriend. Is mom home? Will this prick say where he’s calling from? Does the other, skankier strip bar charge a cover? Is Hank boning his girlfriend at our house?
Decisions, Decisions.
I pulled out the phone just to see if I force him to make a decision. Maybe I just did it too see the beads of perspiration break out on his forehead, flashing in the neon and strobe.
I wasn’t always this big a prick, but this has become the closest thing I have to interaction with people whose perspective isn’t totally bent by a lack of vitamin D and the processing of cigarette smoke.
“That was Wheelhouser on Westwood Drive, wasn’t it?”
He takes the idea and turns his back to the carnival of pinwheeling strippers around each pole on the stage. The sudden burst of oxygen and night air as he opens the door are like a salve to the scabs on my lungs.
“Say hi to Hank for me. See you in about... three years,” but the kid had that look in his eye like I might see him in three hours. He and a handful of his jerk off high school friends. They’ll go score some weed and try the same shit down at “Spanky’s”. Maybe I should give them a call. Then they’ll show up here and stand around waiting for one of the other ones to do something.
I blame it on video games. They make kids bold. Once he’s had a few thousand pixel bullets thump him on the video game chest he figures he doesn’t have to worry about what some fat old fuck like me will do. I’ve seen them all, Karate kids that overdose on street fighter and think they are Ryhu and that by pushing a few buttons really, really fast they can knock me down. First person shooter kids who give me that death stare, wishing they had a gun in their hand.
Man, it used to be all I had to do was stand up and maybe glare, if I felt like stretching myself. Now I find that I have to kick some of these little candy asses in the pants. About three times a month on average. I must be getting too old for this shit. Fact is, I knew I was getting too old before. However, there aren’t a lot of jobs you can get with no other real credentials than big and ugly.
It’s funny though. I’ve had people tell me I’m good looking. They make me nervous, like a company that has the name “sunshine and happiness chemical company”. I mean you know those guys are making anthrax. Mostly I just look at them and try to figure their angle. What kind of bounce they’re looking for off the rail. Which balls they’re trying to line up. Or who’s. My response is usually something like,” Don’t shit a shitter, brother,” or “Hey, I don’t know why you’re sucking up to me, I can’t help you any.”
I watch Hank’s little brother and his friends through the glare of the neon light on the mirrored doors. They pile into a large silver Buick with a handicap permit on the visor.
Mom’s car or Dad’s?
When the interior light flashes on I can see the small box of tissues on the dashboard and the rosary and Saint Christopher hanging from the mirror.
Mom’s I figure.
Rich boys can be dangerous. Rich people aren’t used to taking shit. That’s why they rich. Short guys, I mean real short, under five foot five, they’re dangerous too. They’ve had to fight their whole lives. They are sneaky and a little to close to my balls and my fucked up knee.
Those weak ass knee’s cost me my full scholarship.
Hank’s brother is handsome enough and it made me think back to high school and the look on the faces of those five foot seven inch boys. They had more talent, more heart but that wouldn’t make the cut. They knew it when they walked on the grass. They could feel it in their heart of hearts that I would make the team, my only skill an over active pituitary gland. They would glare with the same hate filled, fuck-you prick, and they would throw their bodies with a focused insanity, a recklessness born knowing that this was the only day for them. They had no need to conserve themselves, and when their energy was spent they looked at me and threw a log of hatred for me and my closeness to the sky, and that stoked the embers for enough strength for one more whistle. They became hard, those small boys who would be small men, the weight of expectations and their fathers hopes compressing them until they were diamond hard, but their value unnoticed.
After all, you can’t coach size.
Every year I hoped to touch the ball but when the depth chart was posted their I was at the end of the line. Left end, to be exact. L.O.T., left offensive tackle, watching the quarterback’s back. Watching his back walk away, left hand tucked in the ass cheek pocket of Shona, the most beautiful girl in school. She was the one they dreamed of every six seconds. She was the question you missed in math class or the extra time you spent in the hallway, hovering near her locker, hoping for another scent of her perfume. The warmth of her smile worth the late slip, the thought of it sustaining you through detention.
It was the hierarchy of dating. My size brought me to within proximity to her, closer to her than those five foot seven inch boys spurned to the outer edges of the system. Perhaps it was this proximity that facilitated the lie, but I’m certain that those other boys harboured the same distortion, though perhaps their machinations be a little more complex.
Sometimes a fabrication requires a little rigging.
Shona was the sun that all the other girls revolved about, heavenly bodies all. The boys were simply moons, hard rocks in orbit around a life sustaining planet.
Few of us had the nerve to fly close to the sun, hearts smacking, wax melting plummeting to earth.
I guess grade ten was when this series of hop-scotching through girlfriends began to occur. I was like a comet, somewhat small and insignificant in the cosmic world of high school, but drawn to her gravitational pull. I would get so close, only to be cast out into the outer reaches of the solar system.
It may have been just an illusion but it seemed the only person who wanted my body was the parade of coaches from season to season placing different objects in my hand, (basketballs, hockey sticks). Their whistles would echo in my head like the ringing of a bell tower. I knew what time it was by how many whistles and how many hundreds of times I had been called on with my hands of stone to attempt. A lug, that’s what my basketball coach called me.
“Just stick your friggin hands up and stand near the basket,” he would stammer, his frustration getting the better of him.
Until I found this vocation my hands were never an asset. Short and lumpy, fat digits with dirty fingernails and boney knuckles, they were too short to play guitar.
We decided, one drunken evening, offensive linemen didn’t have a big chance of becoming superstar athletes. Quick, name five offensive linemen, NFL, CFL, any era. No? Stuck? If I had to name a few favourites I’d go with John “Hoggy” Hannah. Okay, so he was a guard not a tackle, but he was amazing to watch. Alex Karras, more famous as a two bit actor and pitchman and another Detroit Lion, Monty Clark who I thought never really got a fair shake as a head coach in Detroit, or should I say Pontiac, when they did crappy they were the Pontiac Lions, were another two favourites. The black and silver Raider bookends from the seventies, Art Shell and Gene Upshaw, with John Madden frothing on the sideline and Al Davis laughing behind those same cheap ass sunglasses (he must have a thousand pair of those cheap sunglasses, like some sort of hyena/ Roy Orbison genetic screw up), they made Raider football fun. Mike Webster the anchor on the Steelers line, Lomas Brown ( I’m still pissed at you for leaving Detroit), Larry Allen (though I hate the Cowboys), Big Cat Williams, Blake Brockmeyer, Tony Boselli, Should I go on? These guys were my heroes. To me they were stars, that’s who I wanted to be. I’d move mountains in three rep sets just to try and be like them.
No one else knew who their names.
Just like me.
So if even the greatest L.O.T. couldn’t be a superstar. We decided over several Old Vienna’s snuck from the back of my Dad’s beer fridge up to my room, that we were going to be rock and roll stars instead.
Just like that.
We were trying to come up with a decent sounding name. We had already decided (We being me, Kurt the right guard (insert your favourite deodorant joke here), and Howard the center) that we were going to be a power trio, like “Rush” only without the ability.
“Fuzzbug” was discarded (much to Kurt’s chagrin) and “Dagwood” (too country), and Lynch (I can’t remember why). After a few more beers (Black Label this time, gotta move around in Dad’s fridge if you don’t want to get caught) Howard had a brainstorm. He rarely got beyond the level of brain shower, or even brain drizzle so it just didn’t seem right to waste it.
The beer companies had introduced an oversized can of beer, which I personally didn’t like since by the time I got to the bottom it was warm and sludgy, but my own personal preferences aside, “Tall boy” was born. Since I didn’t have the fingers, or the musical acumen, or the financial wherewithal for that matter to come up with a guitar, it was decided that I should play drums. Decided I should add by Howard and Kurt, who felt that the fluid independence and co-ordination of the drums wasn’t too far beyond my bubble gum and walking nervous system.
Howard, only marginally more talented than me, would play bass. He had semi inherited it from his older brother Tim, who’s own band, Eyeflower, was as they say, on hiatus. I always like the sound of that, hiatus, it made it sound like you were vacationing in Tahiti, instead of banging your skull on the desktop in your college dorm, hoping the algebra equation, which looked vaguely like a bowl of alphabet soup, would sort itself out from the sheer vibrations of the desk and somehow become more palatable.
Eyeflower dispersed after a single engagement. An omen, perhaps, that maybe the guitar was cursed as well as out of tune.
Kurt, who had taken six months of guitar lessons in grade eight would front the band, being the most naturally gifted of us, though it was very much our playing Larry and Curly to his Moe.
Looking back on my self delusion, convincing myself that we could actually pull it off, I had forgotten the real purpose of the exercise. To make music? No. To prance around on stage like a bunch of jack offs? No, not really.
Think about it. The summit of all high school male endeavours. To impress chicks. Any chicks. Shona was beyond the scope of my dreams, though she lived on in my fantasies. Yet, I had allowed myself to be relegated to back behind the skins. Though it wasn’t quite as menial as L.O.T. ,that would be somewhat roadie-ish, it was still relatively far from the spot light, but given my extraordinary lack of any real talent, maybe that would work in my favour.
A few more beer over successive nights (this time at Kurt’s, I was beginning to worry that old Larry was gonna catch on) failed to reveal exactly where we would get drums from. We had two guitars and a hodge-podge of mikes and amps with which to Frankenstein a sound from but no drums. The thought of asking my Mom and Dad for drums was tantamount to requesting to be sent to military school. I can almost hear Larry now, “Well ,Margie,” he would say “it’ll be a bit more expensive, but a hell of a lot more quiet!”
For the next few weeks we moped around after practice. Kurt and I would go to the weight room and we’d try to name “Tall boy” albums between sets.
I loved lifting weights. No skill. No dexterity. Clear your mind, right down to hearing your heart beat and lungs slap around air. Focus on the steel.
Hate the steel.
Hate it.
Hate it more than that! Fuck! you call that Hate? I mean HATE! That steel.
Hate, not just detest, not a wussy little abhorrence, but a real, from the base of your spine malignance.
Then short, sharp breaths, like the kind you take in a fight but don’t really notice. Not too many, you start robbing the muscles of oxygen. Pump that blood like your heart wood if you were mad, force the adrenaline into your arms. Focus it all like the point of a dagger then push it all thorough you, cleansing yourself of it all.
Slowly. Up. Away build that fire in your arms amino acids breaking down in the muscle tissue in your chest and arms.
Kurt’s yelling at me, telling me to squeeze one more back breaking agonizing rep out. He’s calling me a pussy. He’s calling me a wimp.
“Suck it up, crybaby,” he yells. He is the voice of the steel.
Then the fire engine endorphin come to put out the four alarm amino fire in my arms and chest. No score, no numbers, no team, just me and the steel trying to kill each other.
Fuck you, steel.
“Move me bitch” I hear it whisper back through the banging of the bars , the clatter of the pile of steel like laughter.
So we are walking back to the change room, the echo of our canvas Nikes squeaking through empty halls. We file past the rows of old chipped green lockers and the scrubbed smooth floors but as we pass the music room doors I see them.
They are old and worn, mismatched and brown beaten but serviceable. The bass drum has tarnished rims and a pillow muffler with a fleur de lis pattern on it. The top hat is jaunty loose hanging dangerously over the tom.
It’ll do.
“Hey Kurt, Check it out,” I say as a shit eating grin creeps across my sweaty face. “How are you going to talk Mr. Bilinski into lending us the set?”
Kurt smiles his most evil of grins saved for only the most aberrant of occurrences. “Didn’t you date Anne Bilinski last summer?”
I had taken Anne with me on a few occasions, lying to Mr.Bilinski, saying we were going to a movie then walking out after twenty minutes to join our friends at some bush party, affectionately known as a Dillon for the side road that most took place on. It felt kind of mean spirited taking advantage of Mr. B in that way, though looking back I don’t know that he was really fooled, his short round figure waiting patiently for us to return. He had the patience of a saint, which I think is part of the curriculum at teachers college for high school music teachers. Imagine if you can having enough passion and ability to handle, if not master, enough instruments to teach a full class. Then imagine day after day listening to hapless, unenthusiastic children butcher your passion and torture your acumen as they bumble from bar to bar. I doubt for most of us the pay cheque would even cover the tylenol.
He had always been pretty cool with me, even when Anne didn’t have the sense to loose her hiccups and giggles before we got home. Anne was short and round with a cherub face framed by blonde hair and glasses. She also , more importantly at the time, had the largest rack I had seen before working in this place. Rack is an odd term for it, a word borrowed from the hunters vocabulary, though in a sense not entirely out of context. I can see now that she was built for expansion, especially the way she packed away the beer and schnapps. That untouchable set was pointing due south and resting on the table edge before she blew out the candles of her thirty fifth birthday her butt hanging off the sides of the chair. Galactically huge with major moons around Uranus.
She was such a prude though. It frustrated me to no end watching those great physical gifts simply waste away because of her inability to use them. I remember once catching my reflection in the glare of the television set after having my hand pulled away from second base, kind of picked off, caught leaning so to speak. That look of frustration reminded me of Mr.Clarke (with an e) and the look he’d give me after I messed up the same shooting drill for the ninety eighth straight time.
All that physical talent going to waste.
The terminal gunshot wound to our relationship occurred during dinner with Mr. Bilinski, (call me Jerry, please) and Mrs. Bilinski, er...Helen. I’ll confess right now, that it was all my fault, though I have to admit that I the time I was totally without clue. I was polite, quiet and thoughtful. I said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in the appropriate places in the conversation. I ate with the table manners my father occasionally enforced when Kevin and I were eating in a particularly piggish fashion. Utensil on plate, at five o’clock, if you imagine your plate being a time piece, except when moving food to mouth. Hands in lap. Chew twenty times. Minimum. Drink less than 1 eighth of glass at a sip. If you think you’ve drank to much you probably have. You shouldn’t be able to count past three with the glass to your lips. Failure to do so will force Dad, after all it is your decision to eat like swine to remove you from the table and have you eat facing the wall in the kitchen, right where he can see you.
I complimented Mrs... Helen on the dinner. I called Mr. Bilinski, sir... except after he asked me to call him Jerry. Even then the first time after he admonished me I called him sir. I took my plate to the kitchen and helped Helen clear the table.
They loved me.
She dumped me the next morning during spare. It was the parental seal of approval that had soured our relationship, like I had pissed in the glass.
Maybe if I had done that I would have salvaged things.
Though Anne tried. Her little brother Mark told me how she bad mouthed me after we broke up, telling Jerry how I was trying to force her to have sex. Which I was, of course, in a high school boy passive aggressive way, but not the more aggressive spin she put on it. For such a prude she had a pretty good imagination and a fair idea of what went where and how.
Enough to convince dear, sweet, Helen and my man Jerry that I was more Neanderthal than the Cro magnon I had portrayed myself as.
He at least pretended to like me, well enough, but I think he was pleased in the end that some mangy mountain of white trash had less chance of becoming family.
It only took a phone call and the drums were mine.
I called when I knew Anne wasn’t home. She had just got a job at the Dairy Queen which, I believe was the beginning of the end for her waistline, all those dilly bars going to waist and hips instead of waste and loss.
The call, to the best of my recollection, while not under oath and without attorney present went something like this:
“Hey Mr. Bilinski, is Anne home?”
“No. Sorry.”
“It’s me, sir. Eddie Larsen.”
“Oh, hi Ed. Do you want to leave a message? (That I’ll promptly throw out you sex crazed sack of hormones...)
“Well, it seems like I’m going to have more time on my hands, since the band broke up.”
“Band?”
“Ya, Kurt, Howard and me, we were going to start up a band but we couldn’t come up with any drums and I already booked the time off from the gas station and now they won’t give me the hours back. I thought maybe Anne and I could get back together, now that I have more time to spend with her. I won’t be able to take her out much but we’ll find something to do I guess...”
Pregnant pause, from parent.
“So drums, eh Ed?...”
Viola.
He even brought them over to the house. Wasn’t that sweet of him?
We set the drums up in the garage on a cool October afternoon, the kind of day we should have been outside dropping the football or maybe chasing a tennis ball around hacking at it with slivers of worn out sticks. It was the kind of day that told you winter was coming, the snap of it in it’s breeze the promise of a crisp new blank sheet of white. In stead we sucked up the carbon monoxide and plugged the amps into the outlet near the old drill in the pegboard, the criss cross of wires like a Red Wing playoff gift, a frenetic tangle of tentacles the wild cheering of a home town crowd was in our heads. It was lying there dead just waiting for us to jolt some noise through it.
Kurt brought an old, cheap acoustic with razor wire strings and white glue holding the bridge in place. It wouldn’t hold tune very long, maybe one song before the stress of the strings warped the bridge out of place, b flattening before our very ears.
Howard’s bass a thunderous large tube relic from his brother’s closet, roared and hummed, distortion rattling the windows as he four finger strummed through riffs.
I set up the tape recorder, a long skinny two tone green cassette eater and the remote mike. I had been so smug about getting the drums I had forgotten completely to get any blank cassettes, the last of them scooped up by Kevin and recordings from CRUZ radio. The only cassette I could find was an old Anthony Robbins motivational tape, brain washed, dried and fluffed in sixty minutes. I scotch taped the holes and prepared it for the capturing of our triumphant arrival.
We played off and on for two hours, enough for the last rays of sunshine to be soaked into big biscuit clouds and the October breeze to turn from a nibble to a bite. Kurt had brought some sheet music and after a fair bit of head scratching we baby stepped our way through it, Kurt taking a pusillanimous lead.
With great anticipation we listened to the recording we had made, visions of Cobo Hall bookings dancing in our heads. We listened to Howard’s bass thump drowning out Kurt’s guitar, his voice sharpening and flattening from note to note. We drew the only conclusion that we possibly could:
We sucked.
Actually we were an embarrassment to vacuum cleaners, drains and other things that suck. We were an affront, an abomination to the entire sucking profession.
It may have died there, our small 2/4 beat driven little day dream, our back beat hallucination, except for Kurt.
“I know someone who could fix this. But I don’t know if you want to invite him. I think it’s the only way we could make this work.”
We all agreed, hoping to nurture our little, music bud in to a heavy metal petal in full black and bronze bloom. When he said the name we almost took it back.
“Danny Nordstrom.”
Long, skinny, graceful fingers, strobe light blur across guitar neck stroking every sixteenth note’s worth out of it. He moved so fast because music was his life, his heart beat in 2/4 time. His veins hummed in b flat. He lived it, ate it, breathed it and excremented it. He let the music do his talking.
We were simply dilettantes, dabblers.
We asked Kurt to ask him to come out and play. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Kurt until football practice. We stood in lines, running in place sweat gushing out of us, like an adolescent oil rig. Between whistle blasts and coach bellows I asked if we got him.
He just smiled back, half grimace extra chomp on his mouth guard, then grunted something like,”No prob” except with a mouth full of plastic. Then dove into the blocking sled.
I knew we were in trouble right then.
I just didn’t know how much.
By the time we got to laps I figured I’d better get the whole story and between huffs and puffs as we plodded along behind the rest of the team I got somewhere close to an answer.
“So, How do you know Danny?”
“Remember when my Mom was all psyched about me taking some sort of music lessons?”
“Ya?”
“Well, she wanted me to take violin or maybe piano. I talked my Dad into guitar.” A plea bargain of sorts. Kurt’s Dad was a lawyer, he could understand that, just misdemeanor music lessons your honour.
“Danny was taking lessons too. I guess his folks already had him playing piano and violin, since he was like four or something, and he wanted to learn guitar. He may be like a major league freak and all but he can rock that guitar.”
Most people avoid Danny cause he is a major league freak. I’m not talking triple A farmhand throwing a few innings cause it’s mid July and we’re twenty games out of first. I mean like starting rotation New York Yankees kinda major league freak show.
Avoided like the plague, the black death is what it was called and in a pinch that kinda describes Danny. Bottom up Black shoes with yellow laces around here it still Nike high tops or Adidas trainers, brown cougar brand boots. Not black good will army surplus broken down combat boots, standard issue black Cadillacs with all the hump nearly run out of them. In the few times I saw socks, courtesy of the hole he was tearing in the side of his boot they were black or sometimes navy sometimes both matched by some thickness or texture quotient that I was unable to recognize. Frankly, I didn’t ask. Black jeans that reeked of cigarette smoke and perhaps the airy fragrance of the herb. There was one pair in particular with a broken belt loop that he wore for thirteen straight days at a record breaking stretch in the winter. He also wore a series of black and white T shirts with bands I’d never heard of, James Bondage, Crankshaft, Black Utopia, Jude the Obscure. Long stringy black hair that hung in his eyes ,with christmassy sprinklings of dandruff. A cigarette, either full or partial behind his left ear. His skin was a pallid , marbleish white, pale as a three week old dead mans, but worst of all was his smile.
His diet, for lack of a more accurate term, consisted of nicotine and coca-cola, so much so that you thought it might still be a derivative of cocaine. At five foot three and maybe a hundred pounds he probably couldn’t process the amount of caffeine jolting through his scrawny bag of bones, a metabolism like a Chihuahua on speed.
The phosphoric acid in the cola also chainsawed their way through his teeth, bacterial lumberjacks clear cutting a dwindling enamel forest. His lack of any dental hygiene seemed like a poor grit policy. He literally rotted the teeth out of his head. So his parents bought him false teeth, and not a tooth brush we assumed, because he was currently in the process of rotting out the fake teeth too.
His breath was the only thing you could smell over his clothes and it sure wasn’t daisies. In fact, he could probably eat a meadow of daisies, bucolic and peaceful consumed by his great bacterial maw, and his breath would still smell like manure.
You tended not to tell a lot of jokes when Danny was around, just to avoid looking at the rotting wires and vinyl teeth turned this way and that as the wires became engulfed in acid.
About two years later when our little town discovered grunge and heard of Seattle some of Danny became fashionable. He was pre-grunge. He was just.... filth.
But fuck could he play.
I had big old Clydesdale hands, fit for pulling a cart or making glue, his fingertips were thoroughbred Arabian all the way.
He could play anything. If you put a couple of rocks in his leathery calloused fingers he could bang out a symphony. He had played violin and piano at six. He had played quasi professionally at eight. His first rock and roll band was when he was twelve, a band called “Death Pact’, a punk/metal power trio that fused three chord acid metal with impending deafness. They split up when the lead singer committed suicide, a lawn dart leap from the balcony of his ex girlfriends apartment. Despite the name no one else made the jump.
Oh to be young again and feel the torturous voltage of teen angst flowing through my veins, the petulant storm in the spring time of my adulthood.
I’m not really sure what his problem with his parents were. Frankly, I think he scared the shit out of them, everyday they would hope the ‘phase’ would end, like looking at the expiry date of the milk, hoping it hasn’t already gone bad. It was a Doctor Frankenstein dinner table, with Danny providing the grunts and his parents wondering what this creature they made had become.
“How was your day, dear?”
“Grr,” he’d grunt in response, like the monster in the old black and white movies.
“Like some more corn?”
You get the picture.
He scared me kinda too. Not in a physical sense, I don’t think he could really hurt me. He just couldn’t generate the force to do enough damage, even if he cracked me in the ‘nads.
I remember catching a foot there once from Paula Stevens, a girl in the neighbour hood that because of an inability to say the letter ‘R’ was tormented to no end by the other kids and I’m ashamed to say, by me. She was a scrawny little mop of blond curls, that would pork out once puberty took hold. She wasn’t the brightest bulb on the marquee. I remember asking her what kind of insect Jiminy Cricket was. Her answer:
A grasshopper.
But Paula knew when she was being picked on, which was fairly frequently, and although her r less speech would be quite unnoticed in New England, she became Paula Walla Doodle all the Day, just like the song. One day, in front of the corner store, I recall calling out to her “hey Paula Walla doo...” and hoof, nuts around my neck like a voodoo charm. That’s pretty much page one in the fairly thin book on how to hurt a boy that all girls read about that age. I think it’s printed on the inside wrapper for feminine hygiene products. It bent me over but didn’t knock me down, which I have to admit surprised me as much as it must’ve surprised Paula. She looked at me, mouth agape, trying to remember page two of that thin pamphlet and as I straightened up and clenched my fist it suddenly came to her, in seventy two point Times New Roman print:
Run!
Run as fast as your spazzy ‘girly run can take you.
Which is exactly what she proceeded to do.
We had already created a monster, a bitch. At thirteen she became the Tiger Williams of Lansdowne Ave. and many a younger brother would feel her wrath. It backfired on some of us too, after she put some meat on those scrawny little chicken bones and grew into her face a bit. She did not turn into, as her mother would loudly suggest, through the thin side windows at high volume after returning home under the peeking eye of a new dawn, patches of semen hardening on the clothes she wore and the more intimate others in her purse, a slut. Mrs. Stevens was wrong. She was not a slut, at least to us, if you use the theorem, the definition of slut.
“A slut sleeps with everyone, a bitch sleeps with everyone except you.”
The real difference is that I don’t know if Danny would run. I mean, I’ve had bigger craps than Danny Nordstrom but I don’t think he would care. I can imagine the fight now, kneeling over him, hands like raw chicken, heart speed bagging against the walls of my chest. Lungs bailing air into screaming veins as fast it could as though the body were somehow sinking. Sweat white watering over the brink of my brow, careening into my stinging eyes.
Then Danny, battered and bruised, work boot teeth a little more broken and bent, sleeping like a baby, the long grass his pillow. He finished laughing, for now, but when he wakes from Elysium, his magic slumber he will search me out and laugh some more. “You hit like a girl... Is that all you got? A pretty tiny can of whoop ass you can open. Shit, I ain’t scared of you, Paula Stevens could do worse.”
In her time I’m sure she did. Self preservation has never been among his top priorities. Whether from a case of complete self loathing or something darker than that, I’m not sure.
That scares me.
I tried to pry more from Kurt about Danny, but it just wasn’t coming, at least not yet.
Initially I thought the problem with ‘Tallboy’ was our complete lack of any particular musical focus. To be honest, I’ve always been a bit of a musical spaz. I’m drawn to the uniqueness of a band that individuality of sound is often it’s downfall. I have the first and only albums of a lot of bands. You know, the kind you listen to alone in your basement, old “J.Geils Band”, a little “Right Said Fred”, “Marshal Crenshaw”, “Thomas Dolby”, “Wham” ( a fact I hid from my friends and vehemently denied. They took one look at George Michael and their collective Fag-o-meter went banging through the roof, big red lights flashing).
Generally speaking we had no leadership, no idea of what our sound should be or how to achieve it.
But other than that we were all over it.
I still remember the first time Danny came to the house to ‘jam’. It was pretty early in the school year, sun being soaked up by the black on black, black spurred boots digging divots in the moistening black patch of our driveway. Instead of having him pique interest around the house I invited him up to my room. My room faced the backyard, windows to the east so we were shielded from the piercing knife point sunshine, though the dulling edge of autumn diced the first ungreen leaves from the limbs.
The last time my room had been papered was 1984, I remember Mom nagging Dad to paper it while he tried to shush and shoo her away so he could listen to the Tigers on the radio. The room had been a covered in balloons and teddy bears. I had already begun my protestations about the childish quality of the room, like all children I dived headlong into adulthood. The room was repapered, a task begun during spring training and completed well after the all star game. To my father’s chagrin I chose a pattern depicting my first true love, football. Strung in narrow linear patterns were football players. At the top was a linebacker, number 58, in blue, tackling what looked like a fullback, number 44, in red. There were an extra pair of hands around the fullback’s knees, so I guess there was some unnamed defensive lineman, a tackle I’m guessing behind the fullbacks legs. Beneath that vignette was another. I puzzled over this small picture repeated endlessly down vertical stripes of my wall for hours. Now, it looked simply enough and there in lies the deceptiveness of it, a tight end carrying the ball. The helmet, a full cage, would indicate a lineman of some sort, backs don’t wear a full cage, it’s hard enough to see the ball without extra bars to tunnel your vision. Full cage is like blinders for the plow horse all he needs to see is what’s right in front of him. Beneath his eyes are dark lines, used by players to reduce the glare off your cheekbones, not something a lineman is generally concerned with. The most troubling thing was the players number.
“60"
That’s definitely an O-line number, like # 63, Howard’s and #65, Kurt’s, #68, Nathan Brown’s the right tackle and # 66, Brian Hall, the left guards number. My number? Any guesses?
Wrong. #61. Sixty was retired and of course 69, though often requested was banned. Requesting #69 sounded very similar to the phrase “give me laps until I barf”, a mistake Mr. Clarke made every year but we didn’t make twice.
So, who is this guy then? A tight end with the wrong number on his chest? I mean he isn’t wearing fore arm pads after all. Maybe he is a lineman actually carrying the ball.
Hope springs eternal.
Danny visibly chafes at all the jock stuff, somewhat bewildered by the posters of hulking behemoths on my wall. The room is bright and relatively clean, depending on how fussy your relatives might be. He refuses the Labatt’s 50 I’ve pinched from Dad’s beer fridge for him. Flat out refused. No thanks. A wave of his hand and a shake of his dandruffy hair.
Now who’s uncomfortable.
Just to make myself feel better I drink the beer and we return to dingy confines of the garage. It is dark, damp and cool, with the taint of 10w 30 and last weeks garbage that got turned into a little racoon buffet. Danny looks a hundred percent more comfortable.
He asks me if he can smoke and I tell him sure, since my Dad smokes out here all the time even though he’s officially trying to quit, or at least officially trying to get mom off his back over it. Make sure not to leave butts lying around though. Just in case Mom thinks they’re Dad’s.
He snorts the cigarette smoke through his nose, like a bull in a bugs bunny cartoon. I think he’s trying to figure out what to tell the rest of us.
After leeching about as much enjoyment as he possibly can from his butt, something that I personally cannot fathom, he starts to tinker with the amp and soundboard that Howard pilfered from Tim’s stuff. Amplified sound is a very intricate thing, the movement of current and sound through wire and steel like alchemy or computer science, more magic than anything. Sometimes you don’t ask “why doesn’t this work,” because in truth it’s a wonder that any of it works at all. Its like if you held a CD and a cup in front of some primitive and asked him which could hold more he’d pick the cup. I mean a CD looks more like some thing you eat off of than something you could store a libraries worth of books in.
I start banging on the drums and he shoots me a glare. “You play like you’re whacking off. It’s not about trying to beat it to death. Try and get a little control.”
Just then Kurt and Howard arrived bobsy twin style red and black concert jerseys so freshly screened you could almost still smell the ink. On the front a Mammoth red‘T’ will ‘allboy’ in black carved running down the center. On the back was a list of places that Kurt, Howard and Howard’s evil uncle must’ve thought it would be cool to play. His evil uncle wasn’t so evil, really, I mean he hadn’t gone to evil Doctor school or even been an evil honours student. He owned a head shop of sorts but it didn’t sell drug paraphernalia, it sold books. Role playing game books, dungeon and dragons, evil Satanist type books. They were books that should have had warning labels, “caution: corrosive ideas” and “danger: subversive thoughts”. He had coffee and jolt cola and you could get t shirts made from a friend of his. He was a corruptor of youth with dice in one hand and doritos in the other. Howard’s Mom and Dad where technically his brother in-law, so none of the evil uncles blood coursed through young innocent Howard’s veins. Truth be told, they didn’t like Uncle Francis much the first time they were born and as much as they were told they should love thy neighbour the block never quite extended to Uncle Francis’ house.
But the t shirt looked cool and they threw me one. I looked at the back and at the very top of the first column, Cobo Hall, Detroit MI.
I could see Danny was ready his patience wearing as thin as his socks.
“Play me a set of whatever you want and I’ll tell you what I think after.”
We cranked out the closest approximation to sound garden (more like sound window box) that we could muster, and I admit fully that it was all pretty raw. Kurt roughed out a lyric or two, then Howard gave it a shot. Midway through that Danny put his hands up, like someone trying to surrender in one of those war movies where he knows he’s gonna be shot anyway.
“Frankly, you guys sound like shit. I don’t think you have the raw talent to play anything too complicated. If you could speed it up a notch or two you might be able to pull off grunge or maybe soften it right out and make it pop. I guess you gotta start somewhere. Either way it’s gonna be a lot of work.”
We considered a moment as the sweat spread into our new Tallboy t-shirts. Finally Howard asked the question that was on our mind.
“What are grunge chicks like?”
Nice! About time you "published" this :)
ReplyDelete